THREATS AND RESPONSES: LAW ENFORCEMENT

THREATS AND RESPONSES: LAW ENFORCEMENT; False Terrorism Tips to F.B.I. Uproot the Lives of Suspects

By MICHAEL MOSS

Published: June 19, 2003

One evening in late April, the F.B.I. chief in Indiana, Thomas V. Fuentes, went to a crowded basement in an Evansville mosque to ask for help in the fight against terrorism. Some 100 Muslims listened politely.

Then the wife of a local restaurateur spoke up to tell him what had happened the last time agents came calling, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. On a tip, her husband, Tarek Albasti, and eight other men were rounded up, shackled, paraded in front of a newspaper photographer and jailed for a week. The tip turned out to be false.

But four of the men were then listed in a national crime registry as having been accused of terrorism, even though they were never charged, as the F.B.I. later conceded. The branding prevented them from flying, renting apartments and landing jobs.

''People were crying as she describes this,'' Mr. Fuentes recalled. ''And at the end, she says, 'My husband was released, and in 19 months nobody has ever said, I'm sorry about what happened.' ''

Mr. Fuentes did more than apologize. Last week, at his behest, a federal judge ordered that the men's names be erased from all federal crime records.

The unusual public move to clear the Evansville men of suspicion comes after several terrorism cases collapsed because they were based on tips that proved wrong.

Federal agents, facing intense pressure to avoid another terrorist attack, have acted on information from tipsters with questionable backgrounds and motives, touching off needless scares and upending the lives of innocent suspects.

After a wave of criticism, Bush administration officials have been revising their policies for handling terrorist suspects. On Tuesday, President Bush issued guidelines restricting racial profiling in investigations to ''narrow'' circumstances linked to stopping potential attacks.

In a report earlier this month, the Justice Department's inspector general found that in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, many illegal immigrants with no connection to terrorism were detained under harsh conditions.

Federal officials vowed to take corrective steps, including a more careful assessment of anonymous tips. However, they defended their strategy of running most terrorist tips to the ground, calling it critical to thwarting another attack.

But court records and interviews with officials and witnesses show that even seemingly plausible information from tipsters who eagerly came forward to identify themselves has led to misguided investigations.

In Michigan, Mohamed Alajji, a trucker born in Yemen, was jailed for seven days last December before agents interviewed his accuser, who turned out to be making false claims against him to press a family feud.

In Texas, Esshassah Fouad, a student from Morocco, was detained after his former wife accused him of plotting terrorism. She was sentenced to a year in prison for making a false charge. But Mr. Fouad was hit anyway with immigration charges, despite his pleas that he had missed school, violating his visa, because he was in jail.

The federal and state authorities in Detroit exhaustively investigated accusations by a tipster, Gussan Abraham Jarrar, against seven United States citizens, who he said had formed a terrorist gang called ''Whatever It Takes.'' All of the accusations proved false, and Mr. Jarrar, who had a long record of previous arrests, eventually pleaded guilty to providing false information.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told a Congressional panel on June 5 that he would continue to detain people for as long as it took to ensure that they had no terrorist ties. ''Obviously in an ideal world we would like to be able to have cleared people instantly,'' Mr. Ashcroft said.

But critics warn that law enforcement officials, facing pressure to act fast in running down tips, can too easily leave innocent people mired in suspicion, and alienate possible future sources of good information.

Sorting fact from fiction has always been a challenge for crime fighters dealing with informers, whether they are investigating bank robberies or drug deals. With most tips shrouded in secrecy, there is too little information available from the government to know whether problems with tipsters have increased in the fight against terrorism.

But after the Sept. 11 attacks came a scramble to find any remaining terrorists, and President Bush put out a nationwide call for eyes and ears to be alert.

With thousands of tips coming in every week, the F.B.I. was hard pressed in those early days merely to take in the information, officials said, especially since Justice Department orders were that no plausible tip was to be ignored.

''At one time, when information came to us, a lot of times based on experience the investigator would say, 'Nah, this is not something we will follow through on,' '' said Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, ''The director has stated that no counterterrorism lead will go uncovered.''

At an F.B.I academy meeting last year, in which strategies for gathering intelligence were discussed, one participant warned that officials were overlooking the effect that pursuing suspects has had on Muslim and other targeted groups.

''I made myself the skunk at this lawn party by saying I didn't think that rounding up people whose names wouldn't be released, and whose civil rights are violated, would allow law enforcement officials to implement an effective plan,'' said Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College.

Some early tips fell apart in highly public ways, as when a security guard named Ronald Ferry claimed to have found a ground-to-air radio in a certain room in a hotel across from the World Trade Center. The guest who was occupying that room, Abdallah Higazy, was jailed for nearly a month on suspicion that he had helped guide the hijackers who crashed airplanes into the twin towers. Mr. Ferry's falsehood was uncovered when an airplane pilot, who has not been publicly identified, came forward to claim the radio.

A lawsuit Mr. Higazy has brought against Mr. Ferry and the F.B.I. says the agents who took the tip failed to press Mr. Ferry for a sworn statement, to subject him to a lie detector, or to interview a second guard who helped search the room, said Robert S. Dunn, a lawyer for Mr. Higazy.

''They just took his word and ran with it,'' said Mr. Dunn. F.B.I. officials in New York declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

The hope of avoiding deportation by cooperating with the government has led some people to reach out to the F.B.I.

The federal authorities say that Hoda Elsaidy, an Egyptian living in California, told them last summer that her husband was plotting to bomb the federal government's Defense Language Institute in Monterey, and that one terrorist cell member had already been paid $90,000 by overseas conspirators.

An F.B.I. agent, according to court records, said the bureau, in turn, promised to help Mrs. Elsaidy resolve a lapsed resident's visa. But after investigating, the authorities concluded that she had made up the story, and she has been charged with providing false information. She has denied the charge.

Her husband, Hany El Nady, was cleared of the terrorist accusation but was imprisoned for other immigration violations and has agreed to leave the country, along with their four children.

Sometimes only the F.B.I gets hurt. John Habenstein, a New Jersey man who presented himself as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, sent agents scurrying on a sweeping and time-consuming search of a ship for weapons of mass destruction. He later admitted that he had lied in order to promote himself as terrorism expert for hire. But when suspects are involved, officials are having a hard time deciding when to close cases and clear names.

In the Evansville case, the F.B.I. defended its decision to detain the nine men and blamed local jailers for the incident in which the men were photographed. The agent in charge, Thomas Van Wormer, said 40 agents investigated them for a week, ''and at the end we sat down and said these people shouldn't be held.''

As for this week's move to expunge their names from criminal records, he said: ''They were innocent. Not fixing this would be wrong.''

But in other cases, officials say they it has been difficult to clear away all suspicion. The case of Mr. Alajji, the Michigan trucker, illustrates the limbo into which terrorist suspects can be thrust.

When investigators got a tip last December that he was plotting a bomb attack, F.B.I. agents tracked him down, searched his rig and interviewed friends and associates. The United States attorney in Detroit had him charged with Social Security fraud, using the tip and other information from the agents to argue that he should be held without bail.

But one thing investigators had not done was talk to the tipster, who named Mr. Alajji using a hot line for terrorist tips. When agents did so nine days later -- pressed by a skeptical judge -- the bombing plot went up in smoke. ''He recanted,'' said Eric M. Straus, the assistant United States attorney who handled the case.

Mr. Alajji had divorced the tipster's sister, and she was fighting to regain custody of their children, according to people on both sides of the family feud. Prosecutors decided not to press charges against the tipster.

Matters only got worse for the federal team when the judge threw out the fraud charge as unsubstantiated, dismissing the prosecutor with a stinging reference to the George Orwell's work on ''totalitarian government.''

Mr. Alajji was set free, but says the ordeal wrecked his business and compelled him to return to Yemen.

''I did not feel safe in the U.S.,'' Mr. Alajji said in a telephone interview. ''I felt I was being watched all the time, and the prosecutors decided that the file would remain open and I could be arrested at any time.''

Mr. Straus says there was other information beyond the false bombing tip that cast suspicion on Mr. Alajji. As for the swift jailing, Mr. Straus said he and other prosecutors simply had no choice, given the magnitude of the threat. ''With terrorism you do not have the luxury of sometimes waiting to figure out if the guy is truly a terrorist.''

Photo: Tarek Albasti, a restaurant owner, was one of a group of men in Evansville, Ind., who were jailed after someone gave a false tip. (Vincent Pugliese for The New York Times)(pg. A15)